Peter Fullerton wrote:
> Ray,
>
> When you ask Stever, "Does your gayness separate you or are you doing
> it?", I think you miss the point altogether. Your proposal to come up
> with alternative things to do in the company if you don't happen to like
> baseball or hiking reduces this to a question merely of choosing which
> extramural events to join or set up .
Peter, you're getting IN company time mixed up with OUT of company time.
The point that I made had to do with the difficulty of Team or Learning
Organization approaches to the issues of complexity of task required by
the product being marketed and its competition on a world market. The
companies are busy demanding more time and more effort for less money.
That is their definition of productivity. The problems of community and a
decent life become real issues for the company when they cannot hold their
personnel long enough to develop an expert team and when the complexity of
the task is not do-able within the given work time.
There will always be "Stars" who graduate from MIT and Harvard BS and can
break down a computer and put it together again in 30 minutes while
analyzing the latest glitch in Windows 97. These people will not want for
work or learning processes. But for the average worker and since this
involves the entire society, the average citizen, I simply report other
options which include employees and family in activities that creates the
kinds of processes the company claims to desire. Activities off of
company time and for enjoyment as well.
Sooner or later we are going to have to be able to deal with the issues of
group competence, and more efficient educational activities required to
stay competitive. You can't just keep sucking at the free trough of the
society and blame the schools for the wrong menu. We have to be
responsible for the continued education of our citizens throughout their
entire life. School and classrooms are too expensive for company or
government to assume. They can however facilitate by making available the
equipment and instructors necessary for citizen self help education.
I believe that community and leisure activities represent a cheap,
enjoyable way to develop the individual and team growth processes desired
by the companies outside of the workplace. And I believe that a forward
looking company or consultant is missing the boat on a huge savings
opportunity if they don't look into it. It certainly is cheaper to give
it as an opportunity to employees then to pay them to do it. They will
also learn it better and be more creative with it.
HISTORY
I also point out that this was a response in the mills of England in the
19th century to similar family types of problems in company towns. What
the companies did was to hire the entire family to replace the family time
that was lost when the fathers had to spend so much time at the mill.
Before they hired the families, fathers would simply disappear and break
the work schedule when they had enough money and go be with their children
at the local pond. So the mill owners found it cheaper to hire the entire
family. This had the added good of teaching the children (early) the
schedules of the mills so they would become life long employees. In fact
the anthropologists used the term "imprint" when referring to the plant
whistle that called the workers. When the society finally objected to the
child labor and the loss of childhood, the companies came up with
alternate activities. Leisure activities that built the kind of loyalty
to the company and taught the processes that were needed by the company
during work hours. These were the learning and team balancing types of
processes that did not directly constitute the building of their product
but without which it could not be built. My question is why do we have to
keep re-inventing this wheel?
Just this weekend that was the intent of a conference sponsored by the
"American Assembly" as reported in yesterday's NYTImes. The title of the
conference was "The Arts and the Public Purpose" and was attended by not
only Artist and Foundation CEOs but by lawyer experts in "Intellectual
Capital," corporations like Nissan and Jane Alexander representing the
NEA. I have made the point, on this list, that the Fine Arts are the R&D
element of all entertainment which represents a 100 billion dollar
industry in the U.S. I was pleased to see that Madam Alexander not only
made the same point but used the same words.
> This altogether bypasses the somewhat more complex issue of how people
> find their own voices in organizations (of any kind, even families) when
> other voices are singing a different song, and louder, most of the time.
Again this is IN company and is an educational issue. If you want to
complain about teachers and claim that you have a better way, I would
suggest you prove that.
If you want to teach group "harmony," the company work time might just not
be the most efficient way to do that. Voices don't sing louder on
different songs when they know the tune that is being sung. To do so
would be foolish. As for team work habits, the more "complex issues"
that you refer to, can be met more subtly. Since it is often a mind/body
(mental model) self image problem, I would suggest a mind/body discipline
solution. First take the pressure off of the area of tension or trigger
point (at work). Find a way to do it in another situation(outside of
work). Develop the process that you desire in a distant area of the
"community body"(like leisure) then approach the "trigger" area of
conflict with respect and calmness(leadership). Like a Doctor approaching
a wounded patient or a teacher a traumatized student. One of my friends,
a CEO who develops a product that requires extreme physical finesse in its
manufacturing, tells this story:
(The raw material costs 800$ per pound but when finished can produce a
product the size of a contact lens worth $10,000 a piece. If the
manufacturing is flawless, he can get hundreds of individual products out
of 1 lb. of raw material. The product has to be flawless and totally free
from dust or any other contaminate. Once when I visited him he tossed a
small box of the lens like product at me and said that I could have it for
a souvenir. They were useless. Being the excellent scientist that he is,
he began to research the type of employee that would be good with their
hands and careful for the company product. He found one group to be
exceptional due to their patience and hand/eye dexterity. The only
problem with the group was that the external culture was what created this
environment and if he didn't adjust to that and make it possible for them
to keep that connection, they became like the rest of the population. So
he had to adjust his INTERNAL company structure to facilitate their
EXTERNAL situation, since it was the external situation that supplied the
education and practice for what he needed from his workers. The workers
were all housewives with children.)
> To reduce this to Stever's issue alone, or to see it primarily in event
> terms - well, hey, set up an opera group then! - is to perpetuate, perhaps
> unwittingly, the myth that alienation is the fault of the individual
> concerned and not a symptom of group life which all need to attend to.
Nonsense, that had nothing to do with what I was saying. As I pointed out
HP has an orchestra and Bartlesville, Oklahoma where the Phillips
Petroleum headquarters is located has a world class athletic training
facility, a symphony orchestra and an International Music Festival. All
of this in a community on the Oklahoma plains fifty miles outside of
Tulsa. The population of the community is under 40,000 people surrounded
by farms and cow country. If the Air Force had provided for some sort of
culture in North Dakota they probably would have been able to rescue all
of that money they spent training Major Flinn and others like her. I can
see the private carriers salivating as they beat a path to her door to
hire her as a pilot. Cheap!
As for alienation, I have no idea who is at fault. I believe I asked that
question myself. If I must make a projection I would say that there is a
synergistic relationship between both the individual and the group and now
we are back to chapter 2? Mental Models. I gave away my copy to an
artist student. I don't remember the chapters.
> (And you could replace "gayness" with any number of other words, with the
> same effect.)
Of course you can, BUT sexuality is a very big issue in the workplace.
Both gender, sexual proclivity, race and culture. It is the favorite
subject of almost every movie that you see. It creates conflict and gives
meaning to geometry.
It also has given us one of the most creative communities in the history
of humanity. The Gay community. Anyone who believes that they can be
simply replaced should remember that creativity is a complex phenomenon
and we have no idea what is necessary. It is possible that the creativity
of a Leonardo or a Schubert would have never been except for their
psycho-physical makeup. That being said, we can make the same argument
for marriage, heterosexuality, race, culture or different languages.
Leadership IMHO means finding the gift in all of these differences.
This also has nothing to do with what I was talking about in the original
post. I was speaking of the way that we cultivate a community that will
enrich the team worklife and thus make company teaching more efficient
with less resistance from individual's "mental models." I reread my
original post and I, frankly, don't know what you were reading.
Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director
The Magic Circle Chamber Opera of New York
mcore@idt.net
--Ray Evans Harrell <mcore@IDT.NET>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>